Mother: I’ll stop the monsters now so you won’t ever have to worry about them ever again.

Child: But you’ll die if you do that.

Mother: I only want to keep you safe.

Child: I’ll be alone.

Mother: You’ll never be alone.

Child: You know, you really are starting to annoy me.

Mother: Why do you say that?

Child: Well, first of all, you come off as kind of weird every night with this ‘I’m-the-mom-everything-is-okay’ stuff that goes on and on, over and over. But it doesn’t really help me.

Mother: So you’re saying I annoy you.

Child: Yeah. Kind of. I mean if you stop to think about what you’re saying to me, it’s pretty meaningless. I’m telling you about the blood-sucking monsters that are outside my bedroom window, and you’re going on about this ‘here-and-now’ crap.

Mother: Child!

Child: And the stuff about being in your arms. Do you know how sweaty I get when you hug up on me? It makes my head itch, too.

Mother: Well then, if you find me annoying and don’t like my hugs, then you can deal with the monsters yourself.

Child: Mom? Oh come on, Babe. You don’t have to leave now. Mom?

Child: Mom?

Monster: Hey kid.

Child: Which one are you?

Monster: The choker.

Child: No. Not you. Aw, I hate it when you show up.

Monster: Hey, at least I’m not the bloodsucker. Besides, you haven’t been choked in a while. A good choking is just the thing for you.

Anna was the youngest in her family. She was now on the verge of cutting the paternal noose from the thing on the hospital bed that silenced most of her childhood into the fray of background noise. In the room filled with mechanical instruments that gave the illusion of sustaining life, her brother stood as a meaningless pet like a stuffed furry thing forever stuck in a pose of hungry anticipation, a shadow to Anna’s right that froze in child-like fear. She should have relished the power she now had, extinguishing the existing nepotism that brandished her elder sibling, bringing to light in the sterile air her calm voice that would comfort and command. Such a voice was always there, but always underneath the sparkling praise her father reserved wayward toward her brother; it was her voice that always rang true even in disregard. During her teenage years, there had been no other to have helped amplify the voice above her shyness (her mother had died two years before Anna first saw the crimson drops of her own womanhood begin).

“Miss Showalter,” the doctor said. “It’s a difficult situation, I know.” He, too, had been a statue all this time, offering explanations that filled the air with sound. His babbling lifted upward in the room, creating waves of sleep-inducing sentences that floated away and reverberated back to her in wet echoes.

“In a case like this, there’s still time to reach out to other members of your immediate family to-”

“It’s not a case,” Anna said.

The board-stiff doctor stiffened further.

“I didn’t mean your father is just a case Miss Showalter.”

“It’s okay. You can stop.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Is that an answer?”

“I mean it’s okay. You don’t have to say anything else to me about it.”

The doctor gave a stammering smile, but Anna saw his eyes were tired and distant, a face trained to separate from the toxic fatigue within. How many times has he made this speech? Anna wondered.

“Miss Showalter, I do have to make it clear you understand this form before I give this to you and your brother to review. In fact, I’ll need to bring in other personnel to witness your signatures should you both wish to sign.”

“You mean this guy?” Anna pointed at her brother. She watched Frank Showalter flinch as she did this. He put his head down, standing there and staring at the ground. Anna thought of that shaky war footage of a Vietcong prisoner getting executed. It was one of those clips that her father ran often in supposed seclusion inside his private room, oblivious to the child that hid in the same room searching for entry into his mysterious world. She remembered the cowering, adolescent face of that VC prisoner pulled downward with eyes that never fully closed, waiting for the bullet to come.

Her brother surprised her, however, by fully closing his eyes, shutting himself from the rest of them in the room.

“Frank,” Anna said.

“Frank!”

His eyes clamped tighter, creating a spider web of angry wrinkles that would probably take permanent residence on his face a decade later when he would turn forty.

“No,” he whimpered.

“No what Frank?” Anna said.

“I can’t.”

The doctor took a step closer to Anna’s brother. She thought the doctor was going to reach out and place a hand on Frank’s shoulder. Instead, he simply faced him and said, “Mr. Showalter. As I’ve said to your sister over there, there is plenty of time to make a decision.”

“I got to go,” Frank said. He broke wind; it was a loud, sonorous, moaning sound. Frank opened his eyes wide and bolted out of the room, holding the seat of his jeans with both hands as he ran pell-mell and bowled into a group of nurses nearby.

The doctor goggled at the splaying scrub-blue bodies that scattered on the white tile. He then turned to look at Anna.

“Is your brother…” The doctor grimaced and looked up, pretending to search for the proper word.

“He’s an idiot,” Anna replied.

“But is he… incapacitated in anyway. Does he have any condition that would affect his judgment concerning your father’s–”

“No,” Anna said. “He masturbated a lot in the bathroom we had to share when we were kids. He farts all the time like that, especially when he’s nervous. He’s probably out there right now with the beginning of a load in his pants. He eats like a dog lapping food out of garbage cans and is probably still a virgin from the looks of his GapKids sense of style. He’s a freaking idiot.”

Anna turned to look at the heap of old flesh that was her father, a flaked-skin man bone-thin with a mind empty of the need to survive.

“My brother’s an idiot and still earned the love of that man.”

Anna grabbed the clipboard cradled within the crook of the doctor’s left arm. She yanked it so fast from him that it made a slapping sound from the doctor’s sleeve.

“One moment, Miss Showalter. There is a group of people I’ll be bringing back with me to help you through this process. You should look over the form but please do not sign anything until I return.”

Anna smiled.

“Do you have a pen?” she asked.

“There’s one attached to the clipboard. Miss Showalter, you do understand the importance of the decision you are about to make, don’t you?”

“Go get your people,” Anna said, still smiling.

The doctor retreated with a sigh.

“I’ll be back shortly, then.”

Anna watched him leave the room. The scramble of nurses outside were now gone and Frank was nowhere to be seen. She looked at the clipboard, studying the verbiage allowing for non-voluntary euthanasia. She imagined the countless others who had to read such a form, perhaps scanning the lines on the pages with an uncomprehending gait, stunned by tumultuous sadness as they tried to scrawl a semblance of their signature on the large open area boxed at bottom of the page.

Her father was brain-dead; he could not survive without a breathing tube. Those statements were enough for the daughter of Edward Showalter to put his last day to an end.

Anna removed the Ember Medical pen snapped within clipboard holder and twirled it in her hand.

She knew it would be easy to sign. No last minute jitters. No unnecessary legal consultations to further clarify the pros and cons. No media-clad circus to cheer or jeer at her.

She went closer to her father’s bedside and looked over his face.

He looked sad, the outside of his gray brows drooping down.

She reached for his right hand, which was a mottled claw that nestled near the edge of the bed.

She was surprised at how warm his hands were. Blood was still swirling defiantly inside of him.

His soul is gone, Anna thought, and then held his hand tighter.

She fought off the urge to look around to see if anyone could see her alone with her father. Such a picture is completely normal in a hospital room, so there was nothing to be embarrassed about.

Anna put his frail hand on her face and unlocked her emotions.

Her heart fluttered with sadness and fresh tears came.

She leaned closer to him and hugged him.

It was their first hug.

“So this is how it goes, Dad?” Anna said. “This is how you finally show me you love me?”

The hand. Her father’s hand moved. Anna felt his grip tighten.

She shook in a combination of sobbing and giggling.

“Do you really love me, Dad?” she asked.

She felt another twitch in her hand. She squeezed back. He hears me, Anna marveled.

“Do you love me?” There was no squeeze this time. Anna leaned in and embraced the husk of her father’s emaciated chest.

She gave him a soft kiss on his cheek and squeezed his hand once again.

When the doctor arrived back with both a nurse and a bereavement counselor, Anna sat up and gave them all a smile. Her face was blotched wet with tears.

“This.” Nora stoops forward in the cold air of the grocery store and rubs the back of her neck briskly with her left hand, her arm bracelets jangling. “Always when we get to the baby aisle.”

“I’m just walking, Nora,” I say, knowing where this is heading.

I see her let several weeks of pent up frustration go as she slap both hands to the sides of her white summer dress. She studies my face and then says, “Stop pretending, Alan. It’s not just the damn grocery store anymore. It’s everything. You go all stiff and start rubbing your neck like that. It drives me crazy!”

“What are you talking about?” I say and see a grocery stock boy walk by us, eyeing us briefly to catch our little soap-opera. I stare back at his preadolescent face and he looks away, walking past the rows of stacked Huggies.

I take a patient breath. “Do you really want to do this here?”

“Why not?” she says. “Why do you think I cut through here all the time?”

I close my eyes, letting out a long tired sigh. I then look at her and try to smile a degree below patronizing.

“Nora, all I want to do is pay for our stuff and get out of here. We’re going to the street fair. Right?”

She stares at me for a moment and then says in a gritted hiss, “Just take me home.” She drops the grocery basket full of comestibles we planned on smuggling into the town fair and storms off, tucking her purse hard to her side. I watch her leave, her thin dress flowing wildly behind her.

The miscarriage was three months ago and ended Nora’s chance of ever carrying again. After her surgery, my attempts to support seemed hollow and pretentious to her, angering instead of comforting. So I left her to herself and waited for the normality of our three years together to resume. I’m still waiting.

I run after Nora, catching her near the exit. People stare when I turn her around and hug her tight. She goes rigid and then shudders. I raise her head to look at me, seeing tears fall on her pleading eyes and knowing what we both want. We want the pain to go away.

Nora smiles slightly and skirts her eyes to see our audience. She then looks at me and crunches her brows together as if in pain.

“What is it?” I say. She goes slack, dropping her purse. Her eyes become chalky stones in their sockets. I hold her tighter in my panic when I see her mouth droop open to an impossible length, her howls of pain cut short when the lower half of her face suddenly falls off and splatters to the ground. I hear my own screaming when I see the rest of her fold inward, her skin becoming diaphanous, revealing the dark meat inside. Her bones crackle and her coppery smell ripens the air. She becomes slippery in my grasp, like a giant gleaming internal organ. She squirts out of my arms and drops to the ground in a splash and I stare in horror at the bloody dress and the clump of flesh on the tile floor, a ruined mass looking nothing like Nora or anything remotely human.

I move my head up slowly, my wide eyes searching through a haze of blood-pounding shock.

Someone has to come to me.

Touch me.

Move me.

No one does. I walk slowly in a mindless stupor. When I bump into an ice bin near the wall, I come to and see the other bodies. Bloody messes spot the grocery store like droppings from some large animal. I see the crimson-drenched garments on the floor in loose piles and I reconstruct the image of their former wearers: an overweight man in jeans, a young girl in a Hello Kitty shirt, a cashier lady in a beige Ember’s Grocery work shirt. All of them reduced to what looks like slabs of mangled butcher meat.

A car crashes through the face of the store. Brilliant shards of glass scatter. The sound of it brings me above the numbing cotton of disbelief and I start to run. The car, a pearl-like Cadillac, plows into rows of check-out counters, catapulting candy bars and magazine stands toward me. I watch the car teeter to stillness and can see through the gloom of the passenger window the writhing things that splatter dark-red into the windshield. Outside air rushes through the gaping hole in the wall the car left in its path. Several dead birds line the sidewalk leading to the parking lot.

I run around the car and head back toward the exit where Nora is. There are sounds of collision and destruction outside; a chorus of car alarms screech endlessly in the distance. I look through the automatic sliding doors, pulled instinctively to exit this place. I pause to look back down at Nora’s ruined remains. I kneel down, feeling the loss of her strike cold and hard inside my chest.

I pick up Nora and cradle her slick form into my chest, holding her like a baby. Like our baby, the child that defied us its life and struck Nora barren before it died. I whisper the song. Hush little baby…

The car alarms continue their crying outside, blocking out my toneless singing. Nora begins to stick to me, the glistening coat of blood of her gluing against my forearms and neck.

The pain is slow, a kindling heat deep in my stomach. I cough the foaming blood up from my mouth, letting it spew onto Nora.